So exactly how much faster are the latest hard disks? A number of people commented that using the old IDE disk on my Dad’s new Vista 64bit box wasn’t the best idea. I grabbed a copy of HD Tune to get some benchmarks of each of the 4 disks in the system to get an idea of how the drives compared.

Here’s what I found:

Measurement IDE Disk 1 IDE Disk 2 WD2000JD WD10EACS
Transfer Rate Minimum (MB/sec) 1.1 7.6 32.1 37.2
Transfer Rate Maximum (MB/sec) 43.5 45.1 55.1 90.5
Transfer Rate Average (MB/sec) 28.8 33.8 48 68.3
Access Time (ms) 14.5 14.3 20.5 15.5
Burst Rate (MB/sec) 53.3 49.8 91.9 124.6

Graph showing relative speeds of 4 hard drives

So that 1Tb drive really is quite a bit faster than the other drives after all.

I’ve since re-configured the new Vista box to use the fast drive for the operating system, and left the other drives in for video files (but with the knowledge that it will be a simple upgrade path to swap them out for additional SATA drives as required).